Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel (53 page)

This one wasn’t his fault. There was
no way it was his fault.

He glanced to his left and saw
Auspitz lying on his belly in the road. Laird was draped across his legs, and
the guards were clinking around cursing in the dark.

Laird. He wouldn’t have been here if
the Rider hadn’t taken him hostage.

One of the guards shouted;

“They’s only one of ‘em!”

And the other hollered, “For
Chrissake! Don’t shoot
us
!”

The Rider lay in the dark, just
trying to breathe.

The Quechan was out there. One
Quechan. LaChappa no doubt. Because really, with his luck who else would it be?
Why was he alone?

That didn’t matter much, because in
the next minute he heard the train whistle.

It was far off, but persistent.
Approaching. A lonely shriek getting louder.

He risked a glance, and saw the
light, a shining pinprick in the night, a glimmer in the distance.

He crawled painfully over the seat,
flopping back into the driver’s seat and gripping the reins, thanking the Lord
they hadn’t fallen.

He gave the horse a resounding crack
and shouted.

The horse broke down the road. The
Rider gritted his teeth and pulled the horse left. He was feeling the various
agonies Croc had inflicted on him. It almost took his breath away just to
command the horse. It galloped off the Devil’s Highway and the buckboard went
shuddering and banging, threatening to fling him to the ground or drive his
broken rib through his lung.

The rifle cracked out twice behind
him.

He risked a look and saw a horseman
barreling down the road, firing from the saddle.

He hunkered low and snapped the
reins, driving the horse mercilessly, smashing the commandment against bestial
cruelty.

He had to.

He had a train to catch.

The train, closer. The whistle a
piping, a howling, the flickering light a juggernaut eye plowing through the
dark, projecting a cone before it that burned the night away.

The horse’s flanks glowed, the
moonlight injecting its foaming sweat with a phantasmal luminescence, rendering
it a ghostly horse, its neck rising and falling, mane whipping, breath coming
out in ragged grunts that matched the relentless chug of the engine now coming
to his ears, of his own labored inhalation.

The slamming of the buckboard as it
crested and jumped pebbly hills and came crashing down into the brushy, rock
strewn troughs beneath was withering. It kept him in a prodigious sweat of
constant pain. Every time the wheels jumped he feared the axle would crack, or
else his body would.

The flat, pot and pan sound of the
rifle behind then, and his hat blew apart and fell away. The shot was quite
close, and he chanced another look, saw the muscular form leaning low over a
charging piebald, flipping the lever action on a Winchester with one hand and
taking aim.

He leaned further between his own
knees, the pain excruciating, his face bathed in a chill sweat. If he passed
out he would tumble right down, bash his face on the tongue and probably mash
himself beneath the horse’s rear hooves or the shivering wheels.

The horse was slowing now, but the
train wasn’t. He could see impressions of the pistons working in the glow from
the front of the engine now. He could count the cars. Just four, and the tender
and the caboose, the latter lit up like a cabin on wheels.

He lashed the horse again and it
redoubled its flagging efforts.

Then there was a tremendous jolt
that almost pitched him. He barely held onto the reins with his intact fingers
and the thumb of his wounded hand. He turned painfully around and saw the
Indian LaChappa rising from his knees in the buckboard. The stubby club was in
his hand.

The Rider pulled his stolen pistol
and managed to squeeze off one shot before the club came down against the
barrel and sent it whipping off into the dark.

He didn’t want to kill the man, just
get him off the buckboard. He had to get to the train.

The engine was passing, now the
tender. The exhausted, maddened horse would have ploughed into the streaking
baggage car then if he hadn’t pulled hard on the reins and brought it alongside
the speeding train.

LaChappa was on him then, hooting
and hollering with savage excitement. He gripped the Rider’s shoulder and
brought the club down, but another lurch of the rig spoiled his aim and the
Rider suffered a glancing blow to his collarbone. It was enough to beat the
wind out of him however, and he wheezed and fell forward, eyes rolling, lids
fluttering as he fought to stay conscious.

It was all that saved him.

The keen eyes of the horse spied
some low obstacle in its path and leapt. The buckboard couldn’t follow, and
crashed into whatever it was. A low boulder or a track switch, the Rider didn’t
know what. Whatever it was, it broke the already splintering buckboard to
pieces.

LaChappa lost his grip on the Rider
and fell with the wreckage. The Rider held onto the reins and found himself
being dragged behind the protesting horse along with the remains of the hitch,
the rocks and brush tearing at his legs.

He gave a yell to match the horse’s
own and laboriously pulled himself up onto the horse’s back. The exertion on
his harried lung threatened to drag him down, the pain in his twitching taped
fingers making him scream as he pulled.

The caboose was passing as he
reached out for one of the iron platform rails and kicked off the dying,
bellowing horse with one foot.

It was all or nothing, safety or
death in the rushing space between the train and the horse.

The grip of his one good hand saved
him again.

He pulled himself onto the rear
platform and fell over the rail in a heap. Leaning against the bars, he watched
the exhausted horse fall behind, and prayed its heart hadn’t burst in its
worthy chest.

He managed to avoid the train bulls,
lying flat and spent on the roof of one of the passenger cars until almost
daybreak, when he crawled painfully down into the freight car and lay delirious
and sweating among the crates.

Around noontime the train came to a
hissing halt to take on water at a desert tank and a red faced conductor
dragged him out from among the boxes by his collar and the seat of his pants,
and flung him off the train without a word.

The Rider lay on his face for a few
minutes in silent agony before something nuzzled him in the back of the head
and he looked up into the face of his own shaggy, pale onager, still wearing
the pack saddle full of provisions.

The Rider rolled on his back and
grinned, in spite of all that had happened. He held the animal’s face between
his hands and stroked its long jaw. His eyes leaked ecstatic tears. Was he
dead? Was this another dream?

“Where’ve you been, my friend?” he
whispered, in a voice that seemed to come from the bottom of a grave.

He lay like that until the train
blew its whistle and shuddered off once more.

He found he was chuckling
uncontrollably, each gulp of air taxing his contracting ribs until the sound of
the train died away, and then he stopped and sat up to see just where they
were. There was only the lonesome water tank nearby, the spout still dripping,
the rails stretching off to the horizon in both directions, the empty desert
all around.

Perhaps the onager had wandered to
it, drawn to the smell of the water.

“He came to us on his own,” said a
familiar voice. “Led us here and then wouldn’t budge. I guess he knew you were
coming.”

The Rider looked for the source, and
saw the old man in the blue velvet coat and topper, sitting on the steps of his
marvelous carved vardo.

The dusty camels were kneeling in the
traces, just raising their ugly heads and blinking their long lashes groggily.

It was all so surreal, and yet he
knew it wasn’t a dream. At least, not one induced by Adon, because Adon knew
nothing of Faustus Montague.

The Rider stood slowly, achingly,
leaning on the trusty animal.

“Who’s ‘us’?” the Rider asked in a
drawn, ragged voice that was almost as painful to hear as it was to muster.

From behind the lead camel, Kabede
rose from his prayer of thanksgiving, the Rod of Aaron in his hand. He smiled
haltingly at the sight of the Rider’s bald head and face, not to mention his
generally ragged appearance. He was much bruised and mashed from Croc O’Doyle’s
treatment.

“It is good to see you…” His voice
trailed off, his struggling smile failing finally. He took a step toward the
Rider, concerned.

Gone were his striking traditional
clothes. As per the Rider’s half-joking suggestion, he had been westernized. He
wore a wide brimmed hat and a navy blue frock over his loose cotton pants,
tucked into boots. He had retained his sash with its attendant dagger and
shofar
, but they were partially hidden
by the coat.

Kabede noticed the attention the
Rider gave his new accoutrements.

“I caused something of a stir in
Tombstone. Dick bought me this fine coat and hat,” he explained.

The Rider leaned heavily on the
animal with both hands then, a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach.

“Where…where’s Dick?”

“Waiting for us in Tombstone.”

What about the letters? Had Spates
mailed them to Sadie yet?

“How did you get here?” the Rider
croaked at Faustus.

Faustus gestured to the onager.

“He found me. I saw this…brightness
out on the road one night. It was his coat in the dark. When I caught him, he
still had on his pack with most of your possessions. I thought you might need
looking after.”

“And I had a dream about you,” said
Kabede. “The Angel of Dreams told me to find you. After I left Tombstone, I
found them both on the road.”

“He’s a remarkable animal. Do you
trust me now?” Faustus asked.

The Rider shrugged.

“They’ll all be after me,” croaked
the Rider. “It’s not safe to travel with me.”

“You can’t very well travel alone,”
Faustus said. “You’re a mess, Rider.”

As if in agreement, the Rider
fainted dead away.

“There are two things we need to
discuss,” Faustus said, as he packed the last of the camping gear into its
niche in the vardo.

It was strange, but the Rider had
noticed in the past week that no matter how much gear Faustus managed to stow
into the numerous hutches inside the wagon, there was always ample space,
though the dimensions of the interior did not change in any way. Rifles slid
lengthwise into spaces that shouldn’t have accommodated them. Oversized boxes
fit on tiny shelves. He detected no visual change in anything, but the ornate
gypsy wagon seemed to have an infinite capacity.

The Rider now trusted this strange
man from another universe, despite his former lack of candor in regards to his
brother, Misquamacus. Kabede did not fully yet, but it seemed he was coming
around.

The Rider and Faustus had come to
the same understanding; if there was hope for stopping The Hour of Incursion,
it lay with Kabede. He was a
tzadik.

Kabede was still rigid in his
dedication to the traditions he had been raised in. The Rider felt a little
worldlier now, though he envied Kabede’s simpler, more honest belief. The Lord
was not the Lord he knew, not precisely. Not if Adon had told the truth, and he
felt somehow that he had.

Maybe it was better that Kabede
cling to his simpler ways. There was no doubt in the younger man. That
unshakable faith would serve him.

“The first,” Faustus said, “is Adon.”

“I’ve told you everything he told
me.”

Everything. Even more than he had
told Kabede, because frankly, Kabede didn’t need to know Adon’s thoughts on the
origins of the Lord and Creation. In the three weeks they had spent laid up in
camps, moving slowly in the direction of Tombstone by a circuitous route while
he recovered from his beating at the hands of Croc O’Doyle in the Yuma Penitentiary,
he had had ample time to discuss Adon’s revelations with both of them.

At first he had wanted to drive them
away from him, sure Adon and his Creed would be on his trail. But Faustus had
assured him no power Adon commanded could find him while he was within the
vardo, and no one could physically track them either. Miraculously, its tyres
left no ruts, its camels no tracks. Even the onager left no trail when it was
tied to the vardo.

He still felt it was urgent to get
to Tombstone. Kabede had told him that when he and Belden had arrived and
sought out Sadie Marcus in the hopes that Spates had mailed her the translated
letters between Adon and Sheardown, they had found her living in a boarding
house. She had given them a sealed letter from Professor Spates himself saying
he was staying in the Grand Hotel with the linguistics colleague he had spoken
of, a mister W.C. Rice. They were prepared to remain there until the Rider
himself came to speak to them about the letters. He and Kabede had not yet agreed
to tell Faustus any of that. As far as the old man knew, they were only going
to pick up Dick Belden.